1 Introduction

Notes 1 INTRODUCTION I. The 1990 population of Peninsular Malaysia was comprised of appro ximately 8.5 million Malays (58.2 per cent), 4.5 million Chinese (31.3 per cent), 1.4 million Indians (9.8 per cent), and the remainder, or 'other', less than 1 million (under I per cent) (Social Development Trends Bulletin 1991). 2. I was not able to obtain government statistics on the rate of increase in numbers of Malay businesses in recent years (see Chapter 6, note 2). One report demonstrates that the total number of Malay establishments increased ten times between 1971 and 1981 (Chiew Seen Kong 1993). 3. A crucial consequence of British rule after the nineteenth century was the entrenchment of ethnic occupational categories. Malays were concentrated in agriculture and colonia1 administration. Chinese and Indians were brought into the colony to work in British mines and plantations, and the Chinese also - as they did throughout Southeast Asia - flourished in trade; see Roff (1967). In 1969, the Chinese were still largely in trade and the Malays in the modern sector were in government service. 4. 'Special privileges' granted to the Malays by the British were written into the Constitution of independent Malaysia in 1957; see Chapter 4. These pro visions became the basis for the increase in Malay privileges and quotas after 1969. 5. The irony of NEP 'national unity' policies, according to some observers, is that NEP, by advantaging the Malays alone, acutely disadvantaged non Malays, especially concerning access to education (Jasbir Sarjit Singh 1991). 6. According to one ob server, the term bumiputera was revived by NEP policy-makers 'so that the non-Muslim natives of Sarawak and Sabah cou1d reinforce the Malays numerically, because otherwise the Malays wou1d have been a minority' in the nation (Milne 1981: 128-9). This perspective states that in order for the state to allocate a disproportionate amount of resources to bumiputera, it needed to justify its actions by including a greater number of citizens. 7. The 30 per cent target was not reached by 1990. Government figures indi cate that between 1971 and 1990, the rate of increase of bumiputera share ownership was 91 per cent, with bumiputera holding 20 per cent of all share capital compared to the Chinese, who held 44 per cent (Chiew Seen Kong 1993). Some observers believe statistics provided by the government on certain aspects of Malay development since 1970 are skewed to the 10w side, to justify continued Malay-only policy (Jesudason 1989; Mehmet 1986). 8. UMNO was founded to oppose British policy initiatives in the period after World War 11, when the Ma1ayan Union Plan was proposed to give equal 205 206 Notes political participation to the whole population, regardless of ethnicity; this was perceived by the Malays as an attempt to abolish the system of Malay privileges. UMNO demanded - and achieved - retention of the sultan system and references to the special privileges of the Malays in the constitu tion (see Roff 1967). 9. For a discussion of the educational opportunities available within the hierar chy of the pre- and post-colonial Malay civi1 service, see Khasnor Johan (1984) and Puthucheary (1978). See Jasbir Sarjit Singh (1991) for a discus sion of how the children of these families benefited most from NEP. 10. See Scott's (1976) pivotal 'moral economy' thesis, which argues that tradi tional cultures do not develop economically because of conservative social formulations; Geertz (1963a) argues a similar point. 11. The ringgit is the Malaysian unit of currency. At the time of my research, 1 ringgit was equivalent to around US$0.38. The enormous resources for development since 1970 have come partially from foreign investment and domestic and foreign debt, and primarily from offshore petroleum dis covered in 1973 (Jesudason 1989). 12. Widely read authors McClelland (1961) and Hagen (1962) used Schumpterian theories. This model had a profoundly 'democratic' appeal to development banks in the 1960s and 1970s. 13. The two standard studies of Malay entrepreneurs define entrepreneurs in essentially Schumpeterian/Weberian terms. See Abdul Aziz Mahmud (1981) and Popen oe (1969). 14. There is a Malay term for entrepreneur - usahawan - but no one uses it. 15. An example is the American 'entrepreneur' Donald Trump. Upon his near bankruptcy, no one began calling hirn an 'ex-entrepreneur'. 2 OBLIGATION AND IDENTITY: PARENTS, SPOUSES, SIBLINGS, ANDMALAYS 1. I have given my informants pseudonyms except in two noted instances where individuals were public figures whose identities I did not feel bound to protect. I have also changed small details of some biographies or enter prises which I perceived were too revealing. 2. Chinese students do better on the national tests in both English and Bahasa Melayu than Malay students, a source of embarrassment to the govemment (Jasbir Sarjit Singh et al. 1989). 3. The '2020' came from 'Vision 2020', the Prime Minister' s highly touted economic and social plan. See Chapter 4. 4. Throughout this study, I shall refer to the group of entrepreneurial Malays as a status group, more in line with Weber's conception of stratification based on symbolic-cultural value (1974) than as a class determined by economic role in the Marxist sense (see A. Kahar Bador 1973; Cohen 1981 ). 5. For a similar point, see Biggart (1989) and Cohen (1981). 6. For discussions of aspects of Malay matrifocality, see Banks (1983) and Wazir Jahan Karim (1992). Notes 207 7. Arranged marriages were the norm in the generation of my informants' mothers; according to one study, the vast majority of women in that genera tion - 85 per cent - did not choose their own husband (Iones 1994). 8. In 1947, the median age at first marriage for Malay males was 23; in 1980 it was 26. For females during the same period, age at first marriage rose from 16.5 to 22.5 (Jones 1994). 9. Classics in this 'domains of balance' approach are the articles in Atkinson and Errington (1990). 10. Recent studies provide an increasingly sophisticated understanding of gender and its effects on social power and control in Southeast Asia. See Ong and Peletz (1995); Pe letz (1996). I I. The 1984/85 Malaysian Population and Family Survey showed that double income families constituted 44.2 per cent of all households in the country (New Straits Times, 15 May 1994). 12. Polygamy, the Prophet said, is intended to prevent such socially disruptive situations as widowhood and fatherless children as weil as an excess of single women. In Kuala Lumpur I knew of no case in which a man took a widow as his second wife; polygynous men generally marry young, pretty women. 13. McKinley (1975, 1981) has provided the authoritative discussion on the creation of kinship bonds through adoption in Malay society. 14. Contrary to standard theory about a lack of economic ties between Malay brothers (McKinley 1975), Malay brothers today do enter businesses together. Two of the three case studies in Part Ir involve this pattern, a ratio I found to be quite common in the businesses I studied. My informants acknowledged that this form of association was 'new' for them - they had borrowed it from the Chinese. In each case, however, the partnership was eventually abandoned. See Sloane (forthcoming). 15. It is said that the former Finance Minister, Daim Zainuddin, now the Prime Minister's economic adviser, picks all of his rising Malay corporate stars out of the MCKK network. 16. See Kessler (1992) for adescription of how the anomalous terms 'Malay', 'Muslim', and 'bumiputera' actually make definitions of ethnicity, religion, and race nearly impossible in contemporary Malaysia. 17. It is estimated that 1.5 million workers in a workforce of 8 million in Malaysia is comprised of illegal and legal immigrants, mostly Indonesians, Filipinos, and Bangladeshis (Financial Times, 19 September 1995). 18. For a discussion of the consequences of Chinese 'new villages' upon Chinese modernity, see Hirschman (1975). 19. For more discussion of these Chinese-Malay businesses, see Chapter 3. 20. The term 'holding company' has great significance in Malay entrepreneur ship. See Chapter 6. 3 THE ISLAMIC VIEW OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP: MODERNITY AND ITS REW ARDS I. In the 1980s, UMNO's corporate holdings and many state-owned corpora tions were privatized. Gomez (1994) describes how well-placed Malay 208 Notes 'entrepreneurs' were granted massive stock ownership of these companies. Dato Hassan (the name is a pseudonym) is the director of one of the newly privatized conglomerates. 2. The term 'dalang' resonates with meaning in Malaysia, where the puppet master who controls the figures in the shadow-puppet play is a metaphor for one who has enormous power. 3. Biggart (1989) makes use ofWeber's 'virtuosi' argument in a slightly dif ferent way. Mine implies, as Weber's did, a greater role for spiritual service to God. 4. See Jesudason (1989) for a discussion of how multinational corporations in Malaysia were required to meet quotas of bumiputera managers. 5. This is a crucial concept about social relations in Islam: person-to-person relations are ideally established in such a way that they reflect person to-Allah relations, so that all worldly acts are tantamount to worship (Muhammah Syukri Salleh 1992). 6. My informants generally had not been involved in strict dakwah during their university days, where most young Malays are first exposed to it. In part, having attended university in the early and mid-1970s, they were not subject to the intense peer pressure of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, many of them recalled beer-drinking and discoing in their university days, activi ties which would have been unheard of five years later. 7.

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